[Under this heading we propose to give such Minor Queries as we are able to reply to at once, but which are not of a nature to be answered with advantage in our Notices to Correspondents. We hope by this means to economise our space.] _The Hereditary Earl Marshal._--Miss Martineau, in her _History of England_, book iii. ch. 8., speaks (in 1829) of "three Catholic peers, the _Duke of Norfolk_, Lord Clifford, and Lord Dormer, having obtained entrance _at last_ to the legislative assembly, where their fathers sat and ruled when their faith was the law of the land." In Lord Campbell's _Lives of the Chancellors_, there is an anecdote, vol. vii. p. 695., of the Duke of Norfolk falling asleep and _snoring_ in the House of Lords, while Lord Eldon was on the woolsack. Did not the Duke of Norfolk (though Roman Catholic) sit and vote in the House of Lords, either by prescription or special act of parliament, before 1829? J. H. S. [The anecdote told by Lord Campbell (but much better by Lord Eldon himself in Twiss's Life of the great Chancellor), does not refer to the _late_ Duke of Norfolk, but to his predecessor Charles (the eleventh duke), who was a Protestant. The late duke never sat in parliament till after the Relief Bill passed. In 1824 a Bill was passed to enable him to exercise the office of Earl Marshal without taking certain oaths, but gave him no seat in the House. We may as well add, that Lord Eldon's joke must have been perpetrated--not on the bringing up of the Bill, when the duke was not in the House--but on the occasion of the _Great Snoring Bill being reported_ (April 2, 1811), when the duke appears to have been present.] _The Beggar's Petition._--I shall feel obliged by your informing me who the author is of the lines-- "Pity the sorrows of a poor old man, Whose trembling limbs have borne him to your door." S. [The authorship of this little poem has at times excited a good deal of attention. It has been attributed, on no very sufficient grounds, to Dr. Joshua Webster, M.D.; but from the _Gentleman's Magazine_, vol. lxx., p. 41., it appears that it is the entire production of the {210} Rev. Thomas Moss, minister of Brierly Hill and Trentham, in Staffordshire, who wrote it at about the age of twenty-three. He sold the manuscript of that, and of several others, to Mr. Smart, printer, in Wolverhampton, who, from the dread which Mr. Moss had of criticism, was to publish them on this condition, that only twenty copies should have his name annexed to them, for the purpose of being presented to his relations and friends.] "_Tiring-irons never to be untied._"--To what does Lightfoot (vol. vii. p. 214.) refer when, in speaking of the Scriptures, he says-- "They are not unriddleable riddles, and tiring-irons never to be untied"? J. EASTWOOD. Ecclesfield.